"I left and never went back": The rural towns that offer no way up

Many people living outside of cities feel left behind as the lack of opportunities widens the gap between town and country life.

Huw Nesbitt’s journey out of the Oxfordshire village of Chilton was motivated by the urge to be anywhere else. The problem was it was so difficult to leave. Growing up in the peak of the 1990s recession, his parents faced financial crisis and he describes his comprehensive education as “remedial”.

Chiltern is just 16 miles from Oxford, a booming knowledge economy with some of the most expensive housing and sought-after jobs outside London. But when Nesbitt returned home from university with a degree and plans to turn his prospects around, getting and keeping one of those jobs was almost impossible.

“When I got a job at Oxford University Press my commute every day was four or five hours. I’d have to get up and walk three miles to Harwell, the next village, to catch a bus to Wantage, and then catch another bus from Wantage to Oxford,” he says.

“There is this general presumption [in the area] that everybody is middle class and can buy a car, but that wasn’t the case for me at the time. When I tried to get a job at the supermarkets before I left for university, I couldn’t get to a lot of places to start work on time.”

Chilton is located in the Vale of the White Horse, one of a number of boroughs identified as among the nation’s social mobility coldspots: areas with a huge divergence between local economic wealth and social mobility. It is the 10th most affluent local authority in England, but also among the lowest quartile for social mobility.

Other council areas identified as facing this dichotomy include South Derbyshire and Hinckley and Bosworth, outside Leicester. They were highlighted by the last government in a report by right-leaning think tank UK Onward, produced as a critique of Tory plans for distributing funding to local councils.

A social mobility cold spot occurs when even though a borough or city region may be wealthy overall, it contains pockets of deprivation that are almost impossible to escape - a trap that often goes unnoticed because, overall, the area is booming. A region with lots of secure, well paid graduate jobs taken by middle class applicants who have moved for work may still have few opportunities for local people. Low social mobility means a person growing up in a low income household is statistically unlikely to improve their economic position in adulthood.

Areas with very obvious social mobility issues and low economic prosperity, such as Blackpool and other coastal towns, were targeted by the last government's Levelling Up agenda, the content of which has mostly been continued under the Labour government despite the scrapping of the name. However, this does not reach coldspot areas which, by definition, are within boroughs not in economic deprivation and not seen as falling behind the rest.

However, the government's new Plan for Neighbourhoods does include extra emphasis on the "well-being power" of local authorities, a tool which was first introduced in the Local Government Act 2000 under Blair. It gives councils a general power to do "anything they consider likely to promote or improve the economic, social or environmental well-being of their communities".

But as Labour is preparing a new push for growth and its own industrial strategy, these hidden social mobility coldspots risk being overlooked once again.

In rural coldspots, local wealth is entrenched in middle class conurbations but does not reach the poorest areas. Yet because the wider borough is not considered to be socially deprived, the mechanism that sees struggling towns such as Blackpool and other struggling coastal communities rewarded with extra government funding (albeit too often with limited impact) does not apply to them. They are invisible.

Nesbitt is now a writer and editor in his forties, living in London and with clients across Europe. He made his escape, but says little has changed in his hometown for 30 years; in fact, the influx of London commuters to the area has only made the situation worse.

There has been new housing built in the village, but the local shop has closed. The bus links with local towns are still infrequent. Wantage, a nearby market town, has suffered visibly during the pandemic years and though private housing is becoming eye-wateringly expensive, it is occupied by London commuters. There is little new social housing and still few local job opportunities that don’t require a car.

“I left and I didn’t come back. Sometimes I wish things could have been different,” he says. “It feels like if you’re not wealthy there you don’t have any choice but to leave because your ability to generate wealth there is so limited.”

The growing rural-town divide

The UK’s social mobility coldspots are all located in rural or semi-rural areas. In big cities such as Manchester and London, the opposite force is at play: Hackney is the 22nd most deprived borough in the country and the fifth most socially mobile, partly because the vast opportunities provided by the capital are so easy to access.

With economic focus on the Great Wealth Transfer between the Boomer and Millennial generations – in which £5.5 trillion in the UK alone will be passed down in the form of inheritance and asset wealth in the next two decades – social mobility is heading for a deep freeze.

Universities are facing an existential crisis too: there is the looming financial collapse, but also the fact that higher education no longer confers the same opportunities it once did as progress is so closely linked to inherited wealth. This is particularly visible in areas with low social mobility.

Employers are becoming more aware of this issue as well. In February, insurance giant Zurich began publishing social mobility pay data. It revealed that the mean average pay gap at the company is 10.5% between employees from professional and lower socioeconomic backgrounds. But too few businesses – especially those who recruit from coldspot areas – are collecting this information. Only a handful of the most progressive organisations are even recording such data and there is no regulatory requirement to do so. Making this mandatory for every private and charity sector contractor as well as every public sector body would shine a light on which organisations could and should be doing more to recruit and promote a more diverse workforce.

Despite the government seeking to create new growth, experts fear there is no plan to reach areas that have lower social mobility.

Lee Ellott-Major, professor of social mobility at University of Exeter, says the issue is understood by local authorities but ignored by central government. “The UK is a small country but it’s really stark: you can go from crossing the road to an area of high to low mobility. Labour’s obsession with growth is an issue,” he says.

“To get inclusive growth you need to create opportunities and pay people for doing jobs in their locality, and that’s a much bigger challenge than the narrow narrative on social mobility.”

Just as Nesbitt experienced, Ellott-Major is concerned the government still believes social mobility is only about helping people from poorer areas leave behind or escape their roots, rather than providing opportunities that allow greater economic mobility where they grew up.

The professor grew up in Feltham, an impoverished area of west London. He left school with few qualifications and at the age of 16 he was unemployed and living alone. He eventually found work as a bin man.

“I’d stopped going to school. No-one in my family had ever been to university. My future looked pretty bleak,” he once reflected. He was rescued by a friend who persuaded him to return to study, and whose family allowed him to lodge with them. A teacher then convinced him to apply to university, and a lecturer encouraged him to go on to further doctorate study. He says his story proves social mobility is not about individual self-improvement, but is always achieved through wider, group support.

‘I was just written off’

For many, that journey is impossible. Jayde Bates from Hinckley, another area identified as a social mobility coldspot, was one the first people in her family to go to university. At school she was interested in pursuing a career in the arts but was ushered away from taking a creative path by careers advisors at her school.

“I was told when picking my options – you can’t do drama because you’ll never get to be an actress because you don’t come from the right background. I was told – you’d be better off doing business studies. I was just written off,” she says.

“I did a degree in social policy because I was so angry about it.”

Jayde Bates Pic: The Lead

After graduation, another setback: she was put forward for the Foreign Office graduate recruitment scheme but had to withdraw herself after a discussion with her parents revealed she simply could not afford to move to London to take up the job if she was successful. And, of course, there were no roles in the service available elsewhere in the country.

Now in her forties, Bates works in PR and has had the chance to travel all over the world – but by staying local to her family she had to turn her back on early opportunities. And she too observes there is little change, with the poorest children in her borough still having few opportunities to change their life path.

“Nobody expects the kids here to amount to anything, so they never try,” she says. “There are no opportunities for working class children now to be able to play instruments or take part in drama. You have to pay for that and working class children can’t afford to do that. Even a lot of middle class children can’t afford to do it now either, that’s the reality.

“For those of us who can get away, that gives the opportunity. If you can’t get away, those people stay stuck.”

Breaking these patterns means intervening at a local level, not just through national education policy.

Elliott-Major says both government and other local institutions like universities need to play their part in making that change. Right now, that’s not happening. Jobs in these wealthy areas suffer from “gatekeeping”, where the people recruited all come from the same middle class backgrounds – pulling a barrier up for those seeking to improve their economic chances.

Research by the consultancy giant PwC found that 83 per cent of the general public considers access to local employment opportunities as a significant obstacle to achieving social mobility, and they aren’t wrong. A poll of HR teams by CIPD found that only 9 per cent of employers had focused on improving diversity around socioeconomic status in the five years to 2023.

“Those employers that could do something about it, such higher education institutions, aren’t creating accessible jobs to make this happen,” Elliott-Major said. This is particularly true when it comes to climbing the pay grades. According to the government’s own data, only 18 per cent of senior civil servants are from working class or low socioeconomic backgrounds, compared to 43 per cent of the sector’s most junior grades. Depressingly, this figure had barely changed between 1967 and 2021; the data was not even collected between those dates.

“You have elite universities such as Oxford, and you go outside of their campuses and within minutes you can have some of the most deprived housing areas in the country. Just having something next to you geographically doesn’t mean it’s going to lift opportunities. You have to be really intentional about this stuff,” he says. “We need to accelerate the distribution of public sector jobs around the country. London is a global city that will always look after itself, so why are there still too many public sector jobs based in London? It has to be senior roles that are redistributed too.”

The government’s growth strategy could provide an opportunity to attach government funding to schemes that create high quality jobs for all. But there’s a catch: doing that successfully would require a lot of oversight from groups of local leaders that really understand each region – organisations which, in most areas, simply do not exist.

Duncan Exley, author of ‘The End of Aspiration: Social mobility and our children’s fading prospects’, says all he’s hearing from Labour so far is macroeconomic policy, such setting a target inflation rate of 2 per cent annually, “but local people don’t live in the macroeconomy”

For overwhelmed councils, already struggling to manage basic expectations such as adult social care and getting the bins taken out on time, social mobility has not been a priority. And even if it was, they do not have the power to make change.

“Hardly anything is devolved. There’s an absolute paucity of power, agency or knowledge at the local level. Who do you talk about? What power would they have?” Exley observes.

Then there is the disconnect between education policy (also driven by central government) and industrial ambitions. Further education colleges, a real powerhouse of social mobility through skills training, have been gutted by austerity and the paucity of good FE education has been particularly damaging in these social mobility coldspot areas.

Exley says we are in the perverse situation where experienced welders can be paid almost twice as much for continuing in their trade than for teaching these skills in FE as part of an apprenticeship.

Meanwhile, the barriers to employment are getting higher. Exley would like to see the government doing more with its own cash to actively promote social mobility.

“The government can’t go telling companies what to do, but it has got some power over government departments and over its procurement. These are quite good at covering the protected characteristics of gender and ethnicity but when it comes to socioeconomic background or where you’re actually from, it’s not there. They should be looking at those gaps,” he says.

With an economy that has stalled for well over a decade, social mobility is frozen in coldspot areas simply because jobs are not available. Cath Harrison has lived in the South Derbyshire village of Finden, also within a coldspot borough, since she was born – 53 years ago. She was brought up on a farm, the land later sold for housing which is priced far out of the family’s reach. She says despite the great investment in property in the area, the quality of life for residents is declining. Former shops and services have closed down, and residents must now travel by car to reach a supermarket or pub.

Cath Harrison Pic: The Lead

The biggest change, she says, has been in the ease of securing employment. When she was at school there were guaranteed apprenticeships available for school leavers at major local employers such as the railway and Rolls Royce, and later Toyota which moved into the region.

While she found it easy to find work, train in office administration and become a homeowner, these routes have proved more difficult for her two young adult sons.

“When they left school there was nothing in then way of apprenticeships,” she says. Both her sons have found work in a factory but still live at home, and she feared she cannot see a path to independence for them. “People are expected to go from school to college, and then once they’ve got that they’ll say they’ve got a degree in business studies. There’s so much pressure on them.”

Without new opportunities, education alone does not promote social mobility – particularly for those in declining towns and villages within otherwise wealthy areas. “You can educate as many people as you want, but if they’re all going to be competing for the same number of the jobs, they’re not going to get social mobility,” Exley says.

How is a lack of social mobility being tackled?

A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office told The Lead: “Breaking down barriers to opportunity is one of this Government’s central missions. As part of the Plan for Change, we are raising our sights as a nation and focusing on ensuring everyone is able to thrive at school, at work and in life, no matter their background.

“While change does not happen overnight, we have already taken action to fix the foundations of this country, including by creating a taskforce to tackle child poverty and establishing the National Wealth Fund so that everyone benefits from higher growth.

“Our ambitious devolution plans will put power in the right places so local leaders can deliver better public services. This will include working in partnership with towns across the UK to drive and sustain lasting improvements for local communities.”

Want to help tackle social mobility challenges?

Supporting social mobility requires local action. If you are run a business, gathering data about the economic background and even the location of the staff you recruit can help highlight issues around lack of mobility. Class-blind recruitment practices can also overcome this hurdle.

Write to your local councillors and MP to demand that contractors working for local and central government are required to monitor social mobility data and to create high-quality jobs in areas outside economic hubs such as university cities.

You can support social mobility programmes across the country by donating to charities working with young people from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, including upReach, Making the Leap and the Social Mobility Foundation.

About the author: Hannah Fearn is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs. She was comment editor of The Independent for seven years, and has previously worked for The Guardian, Times Higher Education and Inside Housing. She has a special interest in inequality, poverty, housing, education and life chances.

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